End Times Undone

Merge; 2014

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Music from this release

David Kilgour’s decades-long body of work, both solo and with his vastly influential New Zealand indie-pop band the Clean, has been remarkably consistent and reliable. That’s a horrible thing to say about an artist, even when meant with the best intentions, yet there it is: you can pick up any of Kilgour’s releases over the years and be assured, within a small margin of variance, that the music on said release will be jangly, charming, unassuming hummable, and non-cloyingly cozy. His latest, lovely solo album, End Times Undone, is no different. But in this case—as with all his more recent albums—consistency and reliability do not necessarily mean stagnancy and complacency.

For one thing, End Times Done isn’t all jangle. Bucking the reductive Dunedin Sound stereotype, but not too radically, the album bobs on a sea of distorted swirl and psychedelic drift. “Like Rain” has all the languorous aggression and romanticized gloom of early Jesus and Mary Chain—including a couple licks of vocal melody that seem like nods to “Just Like Honey”—only rendered in a bursts of stained-glass-filtered sunlight. In the most panoramic way possible, “Crow” evokes vintage Neil Young & Crazy Horse, a veritable horse’s skeleton of a song, all sun-bleached bones and sandblasted, single-note leads. That motif of dreamy Americana resurfaces in “Comin’ On”, an exploration of the admittedly narrow overlap between Loaded-era Velvet Underground and R.E.M.’s formative twang.

Kilgour is a cultural institution in his native New Zealand, but his vista has always been much broader. In that sense, he’s a kindred spirit to fellow NZ-born songwriter Dean Wareham—and whether it’s synchronicity or something more premeditated, there’s something Galaxie 500-like to “Dropper”. Kilgour’s keening voice slices through a druggy fog, and his monstrously blown-out guitar solo winds its way through the song like a disembodied earthquake. That dynamic drops with a sharp intake of breath on “I Don’t Want to Live Alone”: “She’s got trees in her head/ Dancing trees in her head”, sings Kilgour over a playfully shambolic keyboard vamp. Limber and loose, it’s the album’s best ventilated moment—and when the song ultimately disintegrates, it’s like a child who finds himself abruptly bored with his toy.

Kilgour’s history as a songwriter is considerable, but he never seems obsessed with it. End Times Undone is a record that, like his best work, exists in the interminable, indefinable now—a rapturous purgatory of memory, images, and slippery wisps of emotion. It’s as anti-ego as music gets, and that’s always been one of the most beautiful things about Kilgour’s songs, a virtue that makes his steady consistency less of a hindrance and more of an aesthetic quirk. His ability to barely change is one of the most intriguing things about him—and that’s never been more evident than in End Times Done’s high point, “Some Things You Don’t Get Back”. Foregoing jangle in favor of slashing strum, the song comes on pensive but never goes over the melancholic cliff. In some ways, it feels like a celebration. Some things you don’t get back because you shouldn’t get them back. That’s a good thing. In much the same way, End Times Undone neither elbows past nor dwells too much on Kilgour’s considerable legacy. It’s a frozen moment in a continuum, and it shines with suitable magic.